A collection of best practice articles to help grow companies with an emphasis on finance. The goal of the blog is to explain how these best practices work, enabling anyone to put these ideas to immediate use. Articles are written by Matt H. Evans, CPA, CMA, CFM

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NOTE: Effective January 1, 2017, I will no longer post new articles since I am now fully retired.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Want a Superior Workforce? Hire Women

It goes
without saying that people make the difference in great companies. Author Jim
Collins brought this point home in his book: Good to Great. One reason
this can be challenging is that people are different and they may not work well
with others. So how do you reduce the selection process and find people who can
add the highest value across the entire workforce? Well you may have to be
somewhat bias in favor of women.

Take for
example Alibaba (China’s Amazon.com), a landmark company founded by Jack Ma who
recently explained that the success of Alibaba has a lot to do with women.
According to Ma, women tend to care for others whereas men are too focused on
caring for themselves. Women are a natural fit for managing teams, working well
with others, and leaving their egos at the door when it comes to driving
performance. Alibaba goes out of its way to recruit women including a women CFO
and other “C” positions traditionally held by men.

According to
Ma, the greatest challenge that Alibaba faced was creating trust. People in
China were highly skeptical of paying online. Without trust, it becomes exceedingly
difficult to attract and retain customers. For example, most realtors are women
since this reduces the level of distrust. Breaking through the trust barrier is
incredibly important and women can be instrumental in gaining trust from
customers.

But’s leave
the world of Alibaba and take a look at the science between men and women.
Recent studies of the brain indicate that men and women are wired differently.
A women’s brain is much more active across different sections of the brain
while a man’s brain has more isolated and concentrated activity. It appears
that women can multi-task and handle a wide range of simultaneous challenges
whereas men like to start and complete a single challenge with high intensity.
This is why women often run the family and make better managers in highly
chaotic environments where multi-tasking is required.

And now for
the final nail in the coffin: STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Math. Over the last several years, a lot of discussion has been made that if
you want to build a workforce for the future, you better have people who are
adept in STEM. According to the University of Missouri, in 70 percent of countries
where statistics are available girls overwhelmingly outperform their male
counterparts in STEM. The study is based on scores of 1.5 million students.

“Even in countries where women's liberties
are severely restricted, we found that girls are outperforming boys in reading,
mathematics, and science literacy by age 15, regardless of political, economic,
social, or gender-equality issues and policies found in those countries,” –
David Geary, University of Missouri

The fact
that women are held back translates into real losses for countries throughout
the world. According to the International Monetary Fund, over forty countries
lose more than 15% of their gross domestic product because of how women are
denied opportunities in the workforce. For countries, like Iran, where women
are severely held back the loss exceeds 30%.

“Board members named
John, Robert, James and William outnumber all female board members at S&P
1500 companies.” – Ernst and Young

Regrettably,
even some of the best companies in the United States don’t get it. This was
well described in Newsweek’s cover story dated February 6, 2015 titled: What
Silicon Valley Thinks of Women. The numbers don’t lie: Women comprise a
paltry 30% of the workforce for Google, Apple, and Twitter. And these percentages
drop dramatically when you consider management positions. So there is a lot of
progress to be made everywhere.

Keven O’Leary of Shark Tank is all about the
money. Money is the ultimate confirmation of success in business. O’Leary
believes women make better CEO’s than men. Approximately 55% of the companies
that O’Leary invests in are run by women.

If I were
running a company, I would absolutely and positively make sure women are fully
and completely equal to men in every single position. If you fail to take this
approach, then you are ignoring the facts behind what makes a superior
workforce and this is going to hold your company back.

“For a long time I was firmly of the view
that increasing the number of women leaders was a matter of women’s activism,
and women working together. Yet while women’s activism remains critical to
making progress, if you look at the levers of power in nations and in
organizations, they rest in the hands of men. And to continue to rely on women
alone to disrupt the status quo is really an illogical approach.” – Elizabeth
Broderick, Australian Human Rights Commission